I spend part of my day reading posts and I catch myself developing an allergy to AI slop. At the same time, AI is right into the editor, and attempts to change every word I write incorrectly. So not using it would be foolish. Here’s my gut feeling about what’s fine and what isn’t.

Not Fine

• Copy/pasting any direct results of a prompt. It deserves a separate post why that’s not fine but for now, it’s a form of bad taste.
• Any form of GenAI images. They were fun for a little bit. Now, they are just a way to state that the post is AI slop.
• Let AI change the meaning of content when improving. AI tends to flip the meaning when doing subtle improvements.
• Engine-oriented titles. If I’m the reader, I want text oriented for humans, not engines. The engines can burn some more CPU and figure it out.
• Letting AI remove complex words, slang, puns, and emotion. Too much uniformity doesn’t improve readability, it sterilizes the text.
• Emoji. Thanks to ChatGPT, emoji are like peanuts in a text.

Fine

• Syntax, clarity, and feedback. AI can help improve the structure and readability the text.
• Improve individual sentences. I tend to write long sentences and use unconfident words (examples from my post below). Funny that it uses the word unconfident but asks me to remove the word unconfident.

• Research. Copy/pasting the body of a post to ChatGPT sometimes help find stuff I missed and fact checks. Particularly useful for book reviews.
• SEO improvements, as long as it doesn’t change the meaning of the content.

Overall, when I catch excessive AI use, I feel an ick about the text. If it feels AI generated entirely, zero chance that I’ll read it.